In the New Hampshire primary yesterday, a relatively unknown Democratic congressman from Minnesota gained nearly 20 percent of the vote. Dean Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, was boosted by rich techies from Silicon Valley hoping to shake up the Democratic primary.
Biden wasn’t on the ballot in New Hampshire, and hasn’t campaigned in the state. Due to a dispute with the Democratic National Committee about the scheduling of primary elections, the New Hampshire primary won’t award any delegates. The president still won the state by a landslide, gaining more than 50 percent of the vote, thanks to a successful write-in campaign.
Despite the meager showing in New Hampshire, Phillips’ tech-adjacent supporters have long seen his campaign as a way to disrupt yet another arena: the election industrial complex.
“There should be open primaries, there should be debates,” Matt Krisiloff, a former chief of staff to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, tells WIRED. “Candidates should not be basically told, ‘Don't you dare run, stay in line.’” Inside Phillips’ New Hampshire campaign offices are “MISSING” posters featuring a picture of Joe Biden, back turned, walking to an empty field.
In Phillips, his backers have found a competent politician who is willing to take on their pet policy proposals and suffer the wrath of the Democratic establishment. As welcome as a shocking upset victory would be, Krisiloff says he would be pleased if Phillips' campaign results in a competitive Democratic primary.
In December, Krisiloff launched a super PAC called We Deserve Better, which has raised nearly $4 million to support Phillips. The group has been focused on running digital ads in New Hampshire and Krisiloff says its ads have been watched in the state nearly 6 million times. The online ads promote Phillips’ business acumen and criticize Biden’s border policy. Phillips’ chances of unseating Biden are slim, Krisiloff acknowledges, but Silicon Valley is a place where “people get excited about long-shot opportunities.”
We Deserve Better launched a ChatGPT-powered chatbot dubbed “DeanBot” to promote his campaign, only for OpenAI to suspend the tool, citing its policy that bans its tools in political campaigns.
Still, the tech world is buying in: Crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb and the son of the tech venture capitalist Vinod Khosla have given money to the PAC, The Washington Post reported. Krisiloff says that Altman isn’t involved in the PAC and hasn’t given any money, but Puck News reported that Altman invited Phillips to his home in November. And Phillips himself has called Altman “a source of great counsel, ideation, and perspective.”
Altman’s influence on Phillips is obvious. At a campaign event inside a classroom at the University of New Hampshire last week surrounded by about 50 supporters, Phillips boasted about how he’s going to be “the first AI president in American history.” Phillips, echoing Altman himself, says AI will be the “most transformational technology in human history.”
At the event, Phillips was introduced by Andrew Yang, who ran for president in 2016 and eventually dropped out and became a Biden campaign surrogate. Yang, who has endorsed Phillips, highlighted Biden’s age as a reason why he shouldn’t be the nominee.
“Having someone who’s 54 years old, like Dean Phillips, trying to address the challenges of AI would actually help me sleep more soundly at night,” Yang said. “As opposed to the folks that are currently in office who, frankly, think they’re going to be there whether they solve our problems or not.”
But it’s unclear what links Phillips actually has to AI, and, until recently, he has not spoken at length about technology at all. Phillips isn’t on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, nor is he a member of the Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus (he is, however, on the House Committee on Small Business and cofounded the Stakeholder Capitalism Caucus). When deepfake robocalls circulated in New Hampshire over the weekend, Phillips said that the incident was an example of “why you need regulation now,” though the congressman has not appeared to be actively involved in or cosponsored AI regulation efforts in Congress. The Deanbot experiment was a prominent AI misfire. Indeed, Phillips has called for unstifled AI innovation, and his campaign website is populated with plans to create a Department of Artificial Intelligence.
To Silicon Valley, Phillips, a multimillionaire-heir to a family liquor business, appears to be malleable in other ways. After Pershing Square CEO and anti-DEI crusader Bill Ackman pledged $1 million to the PAC supporting Phillips, his website was edited to remove the term “DEI.” Phillips made the move after being criticized by Ackman during an X Space with the billionaire and Elon Musk. (Ackman said Phillips was being “educated” on the issue. Phillips’ campaign has said that he isn’t influenced by outside contributions.) Earlier this week, Phillips floated the idea of running on the third-party “no labels” ticket, and then quickly walked it back following outrage.
When asked why Atlman and Ackman are supporting his campaign, Phillips demurred, saying, “I hold both in high esteem.”
Major Democratic donors, Phillips claims, have been told not to attend Phillips’ events and associate with his campaign. Democratic primaries in Florida and North Carolina have been canceled. The New Hampshire Attorney General sent a cease and desist to the Democratic National Committee, saying it was violating voter suppression laws by telling voters the primary in the state is “meaningless.”
All of this, Phillips says, is part of the Democratic Party's efforts to suppress his campaign. “People who adored me as recently as just three months ago now consider me the devil,” Phillips tells WIRED. “Because I have the audacity to practice democracy … I anticipated that the Democratic Party would practice what it preaches, which is competition, participation, and debate. I've seen nothing but the suppression of all three.”
This suppression led to Phillips hiring someone who has experienced battle with the DNC as a senior adviser: Jeff Weaver, who ran Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and was a senior aide to the senator for decades.
“Trump wields it like a club, right? Like, ‘I’m gonna get you and you’re gonna pay and I’m gonna punish you,’” Weaver said, speaking about how he thinks the two parties approach challengers. “We don’t do that on Democratic Party side. They come up from behind you and slit your throat, as opposed to beating you over the forehead with a club like Trump does.”
Weaver laid out the Phillips campaign strategy: Do well in the New Hampshire primary to increase Phillips’ name recognition, and then make a run for the Michigan primary a month later, where Biden flipped a state that went for Trump in 2016. The Phillips’ campaign thinks it can highlight Biden’s vulnerability by performing well in a battleground state.
Krisiloff and other Phillips supporters point to Biden’s unfavorability ratings as evidence that Democrats are sleepwalking toward defeat in November. In December, the president’s approval ratings was near the lowest level of his presidency, according to Reuters.
So far, Phillips’ backers are satisfied with his results. “I think he did pretty well considering it seems like almost no independents voted in the Democratic primary,” Krisiloff said. “I think if Haley drops out, future states could still get a lot closer, since independents will then take Democratic Party ballots.”
